A LiveTalk for anyone doing Montessori in a real home
Most of us are doing this in a small home, on a full day, with nobody to hand the baby to
And you are still trying to do this well. That is the part almost nobody writes about.
You get home and there is dinner to cook, laundry to move, and a toddler who needs you the whole time. You are not looking for another activity to prepare at 9pm. You are looking for what already counts.
Then you open your phone and there it is. The low wooden shelf, the three trays, the light coming in from the left. You look up at your own living room, and something in you deflates.
And if you teach, it can be stranger still. Rules and patience with twenty children all morning, then you walk through your own door and none of it works.
You are already doing more Montessori than you think
The prepared environment was never the Pinterest shelf. Junnifa will show you what it actually is, and where it already exists in your ordinary evening.
The child who carries her own plate.
The two minutes you wait instead of stepping in.
The way you speak to her when you are tired.
“You won’t leave with more things to do. You’ll leave seeing the things you’re already doing differently.”
An honest conversation about doing this in a real home
Junnifa will walk us through the approach she uses with families in any home, on any budget, in any culture. In this conversation:
- Why doing less can give your child more, and the first place Junnifa tells parents to look.
- The shift from entertaining your child to including them, and why it changes the shape of the whole day.
- What your child is learning from you in the hours when you are not teaching anything at all.
- What to do in the moment your child pushes every button you have.
- How to see the child in front of you, instead of the one you keep comparing them to.
- Where joy fits, when Montessori has started to feel like one more job on the list.
- The part Junnifa calls the Montessori secret, what your child is actually building right now, and why so much of what looks like a problem stops looking like one once you can see it.
Then live Q&A about your own house and your own week.
Meet Junnifa Uzodike
Junnifa Uzodike is one of a small number of Montessori educators in the world trained across the full span of childhood and adolescence, from birth through age 18. She is AMI trained at the 0 to 3, 3 to 6, 6 to 12 and 12 to 18 levels, served on the international AMI board for eight years, and is the founder and head of school of Fruitful Orchard Montessori School in Abuja, Nigeria.
She is also a mother of four, and her own children have been raised with Montessori from the beginning of their lives. She co-wrote the international bestsellers The Montessori Baby and The Montessori Child, translated into more than 25 languages, and her next book The Montessori Kitchen, written with Kristen Miglore, comes out on October 13, 2026. What she cares about is making Montessori accessible, practical and deeply human: helping parents move past following techniques, and towards understanding the child in front of them.
